Blocks and strips

One of the best known and most revered quiltmakers, Mary Lee Bendolph has spent many decades transforming scraps of old cloth into aesthetic marvels. To create her quilts, she tears worn and discarded clothing into simple strips and blocks of fabric, then assembles them into highly refined geometric abstractions. Her genius resides in her ability to invent a seemingly endless variety of complex compositions and astounding visual effects from a rudimentary vocabulary of shapes. Within this work, somber rectangles of brown wool and blue denim engage in a cubist struggle to subdue a rowdy assortment of brightly colored strips and squares.In the most basic sense, Bendolph’s geometric imagery is an ingenious elaboration on the common practice of strip quilting, a fundamental technique of piecing together bands of cloth that is widespread throughout the South and in many other patchwork traditions. Her gridlike forms also seem to play off the structural framework of the “Housetop